Foreword for When You Let the Body Lead by Laurence Letich and Helene Brenner

by Ann Weiser Cornell

I learned Focusing in grad school when I was 22 years old — more than 50 years ago now. I wasn’t a psychology student; my field was linguistics. And I didn’t learn Focusing in a class; it was in an urban community center that admitted anyone for free.

I traded Focusing sessions with my friends because it helped me sort through my messed up emotional life and I liked being helpful to others, but not in my wildest dreams did I imagine it would become my life’s work.

So I got my PhD in Linguistics, but I resigned from my first and last college teaching job, because Focusing had taught me to listen to what was really true and right for me — and that wasn’t college teaching.

At loose ends, I contacted Eugene Gendlin again, and he invited me to assist in his first workshops on Focusing. At the same time, I took counseling classes, but I didn’t become a professional counselor or therapist. Instead, I found myself creating a new profession: Focusing teacher and facilitator.

Combining my linguistics training with what I had learned from Gendlin, I created a number of new concepts, notably “dis-identification,” in which the person who is Focusing is encouraged to be with what they feel instead of being what they feel, with specific language, such as, for example, “something in me is upset.” Concepts such as this one formed part of a new evolution of Focusing called “Inner Relationship Focusing.”

It was when I was teaching several early workshops in this evolving method of Focusing, in the early 1990s, that I met Larry Letich and Helene Brenner. Their energy, dedication and enthusiasm for helping people in emotional healing was immediately apparent. Soon I was inviting them to teach with me, and we became friends.

Inner Relationship Focusing was an exciting development, and people were drawn to the trainings in it that I began to offer with my colleague Barbara McGavin. But these were self-help trainings. I am not a therapist, and even though I did write a book about how therapists could bring Focusing moments into any kind of therapy, I did not involve myself at all in the developing profession of Focusing-Oriented Therapy.

In fact, I even doubted that Inner Relationship Focusing could form the basis for an approach to psychotherapy in itself. About that, it turns out, I was completely wrong.

I have always known that Larry and Helene had the ability to work a kind of magic. I knew that their clients felt profoundly understood and accompanied, and many were making remarkable and significant life changes. But what I didn’t know, until I held the manuscript for When You Let the Body Lead in my hands, was that their magic could be taught. And not just taught, but opened out, described, and explained, all without diluting the magical essence.

As you will read in these pages, Focusing-Oriented Therapy using IRF principles is grounded first and last in relationship. There are four relationships in the room, as you will read in chapter two: Therapist and client, therapist and client’s inner self, client and client’s inner self, and therapist and therapist’s inner self. Every one of these relationships is grounded in attunement, respect, the ability to be touched and moved. This is a profoundly human, profoundly healing process.

Most people who enter therapy come with wounds from the past. Without exception, these wounds are relational. Something relational that should have happened, failed to happen. Healing these wounds must happen in relationship as well.

As Helene and Larry explain it, the job of therapy is not to diagnose, analyze, replace bad habits with good ones, or for heaven’s sake tell people what to do. Instead, there is a profound trust in the living process of emotion and felt sense.

So is the Focusing-Oriented therapist merely present? Passively trusting the client’s unaided process to find its way forward? In no way! There is so much that is possible to do and say and be, within the intention of supporting the client in their own healing inner relationship.

You will read about “being a satellite dish” — attuning to and picking up the client’s signals at every level, verbal and non-verbal, in words, rhythms and tones. And doing this not by tensely concentrating, but by relaxing and being wide open from one’s own inner quiet.

There is wonderful detail about the art of reflecting — how and when and why to offer the client back their own words and invite them to check those words inside. There is helping the client acknowledge and stay with what they are feeling. And yes, there is my old friend dis-identification, translated into something viable in a therapy office as clients gain deeper and deeper contact with themselves.

One of the many transformational processes you will find in these pages is one they call the principle of non-counteraction. In practice, this means validating the client’s experience and saying “yes” to it, before gently inviting inner checking. This is connected to a related principle they call listening to the “bad guy,” where the therapist supports the client in listening kindly even to the most despised and feared parts of the self. As it turns out, there are no enemies inside.

So the profound commitment to the quality of relationship, from therapist to client, and between client to their inner self, supported by a wealth of detail about specific practices that support emotional change, with fascinating client vignettes that demonstrate life-changing, healing moments — all of that surely would already have made a ground-breaking book.

But there is more. We don’t have to simply take their word that this way of working with people helps. Our practice can rest on Larry and Helene’s clear and illuminating explanation of the neuroscience of how Focusing works. I’ve never read a clearer one. (In fact, I’ve never before read a neuroscience explanation of any kind that didn’t make my eyes glaze over. True confession.)

And there is still more. Do you know those clients whose emotional states are rigid and absolute, and who seem stuck in a view of themselves that doesn’t allow them to change? Helene and Larry show how these are “thought-driven emotions” and that they don’t change easily because interoception — checking with the body — has been cut out of the picture, and a Focusing-Oriented Therapist can bring the body back in. This insight blew my mind!

And then there is the very consequential area of healing from trauma. It is well known by now that the body must be involved in trauma resolution. Larry and Helene show how letting the body lead, in the context of a trusting therapeutic bond, offers a safe and integrated way to nurture the emerging steps of life beyond trauma, which is, as they put it, “naturally titrating.” (It’s also “naturally unburdening.”) This is something I always suspected but never heard put so clearly.

Something is called revolutionary if it turns concepts and practices on their heads, and lets you recognize that now you are seeing the world the right way up. Being embodied is a way of being, a way of understanding what it is to be human. From this truly revolutionary perspective, When You Let the Body Lead is not just about a way of doing psychotherapy. It’s about being an evolving, healing human presence.

Read this book. Read it again. Let what you are reading inspire you in your therapy sessions, not as a technique to “do to” your clients, but as a way of being in and with yourself while being fully present to another growing and healing human being. If you let Letich and Brenner be your guides, you will find your practice of psychotherapy becoming more fulfilling and rewarding than you ever would have imagined was possible. And maybe you will find yourself living opened up to embodied life itself, not just when doing therapy, but in all that you do. It could happen.